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Feodorov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 4 November 1879, into a Russian Orthodox family.[1] His father, Ivan, was a moderately successful restaurant owner and the son of a serf. His mother, Lyuba Feodorov, a woman of Greek descent, raised him as a single mother after his father's early death. Although she attempted to raise her son as a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, she simultaneously encouraged him to read the popular novelists of the day.

Although Leonid had originally promised to adopt the Latin Rite, while studying in the Jesuitseminary at Anagni, Leonid came to believe that it was his duty to remain faithful to the liturgy and customs of the Christian East. With the full permission and encouragement of Pope St. Pius X, Leonid transferred to the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church. As a result of his decision, Leonid was disowned by his former Jesuit mentor and afterwards depended for his finances on Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky of Lviv.

On March 25, 1911, he received ordination in Bosnia as a Byzantine rite priest.[3] He spent the following years as a Studitehieromonk in Bosnia and Ukraine and was tonsured with monastic name 'Leontiy' on 12 March 1913.

Open persecution of religion began in 1922. The clergy were forbidden to preach religion to anyone under eighteen years of age. Then, all sacred objects were ordered to be seized for "famine relief" and lay councils called dvatsatkii were installed in each parish by the GPU with the intention of making the priest a mere employee. When both the Exarch Leonid and the Latin Rite Archbishop Jan Cieplak refused to permit this, all Catholic parishes were forcibly closed by the State.

The Bolsheviks had already orchestrated several 'show trials.' The Cheka had staged the 'Trial of the St. Petersburg Combat Organization'; its successor, the new GPU, the 'Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries.' In these and other such farces, defendants were inevitably sentenced to death or to long prison terms in the north. The Cieplak show trial is a prime example of Bolshevik revolutionary justice at this time. Normal judicial procedures did not restrict revolutionary tribunals at all; in fact, the prosecutorN.V. Krylenko, stated that the courts could trample upon the rights of classes other than the proletariat. Appeals from the courts went not to a higher court, but to political committees. Western observers found the setting -- the grand ballroom of a former Noblemen's Club, with painted cherubs on the ceiling -- singularly inappropriate for such a solemn event. Neither judges nor prosecutors were required to have a legal background, only a proper 'revolutionary' one. That the prominent 'No Smoking' signs were ignored by the judges themselves did not bode well for legalities." [4]

New York Herald correspondent Francis McCullagh, who was present at the trial, later described its fourth day as follows:

Krylenko, who began to speak at 6:10 PM, was moderate enough at first, but quickly launched into an attack on religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. "The Catholic Church", he declared, "has always exploited the working classes." When he demanded the Archbishop's death, he said, "All the Jesuitical duplicity with which you have defended yourself will not save you from the death penalty. No Pope in the Vatican can save you now." ...As the long oration proceeded, the Red Procurator worked himself into a fury of anti-religious hatred. "Your religion", he yelled, "I spit on it, as I do on all religions, -- on Orthodox, Jewish, Mohammedan, and the rest." "There is no law here but Soviet Law," he yelled at another stage, "and by that law you must die."[5]

Unlike the other defendants, Exarch Leonid insisted on acting as his own attorney, which led to some of the most dramatic moments of the trial. According to Father Zugger,

Dressed in the traditional Russian black cassock, with his long hair a beard often described as 'Christ-like', Feodorov was a man of the narod, of the ordinary Russian people for whom the Revolution had been fought. His presence put the lie to the usual description of Catholicism as 'the Polish religion.' His presentation -- a moving testimony of Russian spirituality and the history of the Church in that country -- evoked the best of Russian Christendom. He pointed out that Greek-Catholics greeted the Revolution with joy, for only then did they have equality. There was no secret organization, they had simply followed Church law. Religious education, the celebration of Mass, and the administration of the Sacraments of marriage and baptism had to be fulfilled. He pointed out that the Church, accused of having neglected the starving, was at that moment feeding 120,000 children daily. Following a scathing rebuttal by Krylenko, Exarch Feodorov rose for his final remarks: "Our hearts are full, not of hatred, but of sadness. You cannot understand us, we are not allowed liberty of conscience. That is the only conclusion we can draw from what we have heard here."[6]

With the verdict and sentences already decided upon in advance, Archbishop Cieplak and Monsignor Budkiewicz were both sentenced to death. Exarch Leonid and all the other defendants were sentenced to the term of ten years imprisonment.[3]

The international uproar which followed the trial gave the Soviet government pause, however. After serving the first three years of his sentence in Moscow's Butyrka prison, Exarch Leonid was transported to Solovki prison camp,[1] located in a former island monastery in the White Sea.

He was a pioneer of ecumenism together with the Orthodox with whom he shared the harsh captivity. In Solovki, Roman Catholic Mass was offered in a chapel which had been restored for the purpose with the permission of the guards. Exarch Leonid would offer the Divine Liturgy of the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church every other Sunday. When the camp authorities cracked down on this in 1929, the Masses continued in secret.

On 6 August 1929, Exarch Leonid was released to the town of Pinega in the Arkhangelsk Oblast and put to work making charcoal. After continuing to teach the Catechism to young boys, he was transferred to the village of Poltava, 15 km from Kotlas (not to be confused with the city of Poltava, Ukraine), where he completed his sentence in 1932. He chose to reside in Kirov, Kirov Oblast, where, worn out by the rigours of his imprisonment, he died on 7 March 1935.[3]